Mr. Joshua is one of my favorite comic artists right now.

Just something about his ugly little dudes living in a kind of bizarre, surreal, somewhat awful world but just having these really sweet and sincere experiences is really doing it for me.

I keep saying, go back and play some of the portable stuff, 3DS/PSP is kind of golden era. They are designed with tight constraints in mind due to hardware limitations, battery life, and the portable nature meaning you could set the game down at any moment to get on with your life. This is in stark contrast to a lot of modern games that hammer your attention and try to keep you constantly engaged.

I just spent a bunch of time on Phantasy Star Portable 2 Infinity (PSP) and Dragon Quest Monsters 2 (3DS). Both fan translations that I wouldn’t have been able to play back in the day anyways. Just some bright and colorful distractions.

Long answer: No, there are more variables in the equation of solvability than just difficulty and intelligence. There are also different kinds of intelligence, each one their own measurement.

Short answer: Only if it makes you cry.

Save a bunch of money on this $150 product by only spending $20 in materials!

Now just take those materials to your garage workspace filled with thousands of dollars of tools and equipment …

This article does a great job of articulating a lot of the uncomfortableness I have around passkeys. I’ve always said they make a lot more sense in an corporate environment but the level of control you lose in a personal setting is not commensurate with the protections and possible lock-in they offer.

I just don’t like passkeys. They are an overly technical solution to what is mostly a human problem.

This is the whole overarching problem with tech. Most of us have fairly simple problems with fairly simple solutions, and tech has just straight up solved those needs, sometimes well over a decade ago.

I’m not saying there’s nowhere left for tech to improve, especially in the medical and biotech space, but in the consumer market there’s only so much we realistically need. It has been addressed, end of sentence, but capitalism’s need to extract infinite profit does not jive with solved problems.

I’m actually playing the Remakes entirely with a controller and I was skeptical of the control scheme at first, but it’s really grown on me. I played through the first one a few months ago and then took a break before digging into the second. The controls came back to me almost immediately now that they’re burnt into my head.

Sure, nothing is going to beat the tactile feeling of drawing with a stylus, but lacking the ability to do that or emulate it beyond a mouse, I think they pulled it off well and I hope they continue with the remakes (albeit at a more reasonable price, debuting at $40 apiece is fucking nuts; they’ve gone on sale a few times now though (or easily emulate through Switch on Eden >_>)).

And still no Bloodborne.

I haven’t gotten the Bloodborne Launcher set up on my laptop yet, I’m a little afraid it can’t handle it or it’ll stress the poor thing out (it’s an old work Lenovo with an Nvidia T1200), but from what I gather this is basically as good as it gets anyways with 60FPS and already some decent QoL mods.

Still disappointed somehow, but the game has been preserved and that’s what matters.

The Nintendo discourse cycle:

1. Months of furious, irrational debate
2. Releases to record sales
3. 1 year later, no lasting cultural impact and most people agree that you should probably just play the original for the historical context (maybe the 3DS remaster, more debate ensues)

I was a teen at the time and while a lot of this is personal taste, I think Offpsring’s Americana just really nailed it for me. The whole album, but the titular track in particular, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtzKW_ONjJ0

9/11 wasn’t a surprise in a lot of ways, we really felt it coming. Afterwards, in the early 00’s that followed, I remember less of the alt and punk rock and a lot more of the cleanly produced emo pop punk taking over. Stuff like Alkaline Trio (From Here to Infirmary), The Ataris (So Long Astoria), Something Corporate (Leaving Through the Window), and Saves the Day (In Reverie). Appealing to angsty teens has always been like shooting fish in a barrel (see Sonic Youth or Nirvana) but in retrospect, it’s hard not to see that widespread, mainstream appeal of emo as a reaction to something.

EDIT: The Kids Aren’t Alright

We support Cloud in all their endeavors. DLSS can still fuck off ❤️

Cloud looks like Scarlet Johansson, I can’t unsee it.

People hate on Þat guy so much and I simply do not understand. Do I Þink it will be effective? No. Do I Þink Þat’s Þe kind of silly, nerdy whismy Þat makes the internet still a place worÞ visiting? Yeah.

Let him have it.

The funny thing is that chasing photorealism is expensive and difficult and not always the right solution. A lot of time stylized, cartoony graphics can be a better option, and I’m even willing to buy that it could’ve worked here, too.

But they went with this bland, generic, flavorless toon style. This is “marketable” but clearly lacks any distinct artistic vision that could set it apart from any of the other shovelware slop these days.

I set up a library of dozens of my favorite PSP games in Emulation Station and just scrolling through them you can see how they have all wildly distinct styles but still form this kind of coherent vision of what Sony was like back in the late 00’s, early 10’s. I miss that …

The comic actually raises a really interesting point. The internet already loves abstract, surreal humor but adopting it even more heavily as a defense mechanism against AI is the sort of thing that we’re going to look back at historically as having potentially influenced an entire movement.

Although it’s kind of debatable if art movements exist as such anymore. Somewhat related, I watched this good video about divine machinery a few weeks ago, check it out: Analyzing Divine Machinery as an “”Art Movement””

I absolutely agree with you but I think that take is a bit short-sighted and undercuts just how evil this stuff is.

Tom Nicholas did a Youtube video on the metaverse a while back (oh my god it was 4 years ago, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM00M-dRMBk) and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. The pivot towards VR was an attempt to get even deeper ahold of our attention and what better way to do that than with goggles that are constantly in front of our eyes? The same with AI as it attempts to insert itself as a substrate layer of all technologies, and again with the smart glasses.

It’s easy to dismiss these efforts as hilariously misguided but they’re not. They’re extremely calculated and he only needs it to pay off once to make everything worth it, and I think there are others that realize this as well. We just gotta keep praying that these efforts burn him out before they strike it big. I’m neither a praying nor gambling man, but praying is all we got right now to stand in his way and I wouldn’t put money on the certainty of Facebook’s failures …